Week in Ethereum News, April 9, 2022 - thanks to Starbloom Ventures for making this issue possible!

#ETH #Ethereum

Eth News and Links

Mainnet execution layer

• Erigon stabilizing alpha version with merge support, full sync required as DB layout not compatible with beta version

• Verkle tree Condrieu testnet relaunched twice for continued stress-testing

• Predicting access lists to reduce state retrieval time for Portal network clients 

Proof of Stake consensus layer

• PoS implementers call video. Notes from Ben Edgington & Christine Kim:

  • Timing of forking public testnets to be decided at Core Devs call on April 29, clients to be feature complete or need to delay difficulty bomb

  • Goerli shadow fork #3 had issue impacting small subset of Geth nodes

  • mainnet shadow fork switches to PoS on April 11;
    warning: txs could be replicated to mainnet costing ETH

  • Builder API & MEV-Boost discussion

• Latest What’s New in Eth2

• Proposer boost upgrade to mitigate attacks involving delayed publishing of blocks & attestations:

  • Lighthouse v2.2.0

  • Teku v22.4.0

• Activation/exit queue rate-limit increased to 5 each epoch after reaching 327,680 active validators

• Visualization of staking pools, open source analytics of known pools

• Vitalik: simplified version of single secret leader election (SSLE) using size-2 swaps, less perfect guarantees but much simpler

PoW switch off (the merge)

• clientdiversity.org: dashboard with consensus & execution client distribution;

  • Reminder: execution client diversity also required

  • Currently Prysm at 56% and Geth at 87%

• EthereumJS client (with Lodestar) proposed a block on Kiln testnet

• Transaction fees can be stolen if you don’t run your own staking nodes

EIPs/Standards

• EIP4974: Experience (EXP) token standard

• EIP4972: Name Owned Account

• EIP4966: Non-Transferable NFTs (Soulbound Tokens)

Layer2

• Arbitrum Nitro devnet: fraud prover using core Geth on WASM, calldata compression, code uses Business Source License; Twitter faucet

• Polynya: rollup types, regular, immutable, enshrined and sovereign

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This newsletter is made possible thanks to Starbloom Ventures!

Starbloom Ventures is an early-stage venture fund founded by Evan Van Ness to invest in the future of web3. 

What’s missing in DeFi?  How about non-correlated assets - coming soon™️ via Rysk’s dynamic hedging options AMM

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Stuff for developers

• Foundry fork mode test traces decoded using source/ABI from Etherscan

• Experiment with EIP3540 EVM Object Format using EthereumJS 

• Formal verification of BokkyPooBah's DateTime library

• StreamPie: tokenized Sablier stream that token holders can RageStream to fork their own pro-rata Sablier stream

• Bit twiddling techniques in Solidity, applied to tic-tac-toe game

• solvm: stripped down EVM implemented using Yul & Solidity

• Trustus: provide contracts with off-chain data from trusted servers

• EVM draw contract: draws bytes of a contract for overview of its shape

• GateRepo: ERC20 token gated private GitHub repositories

• Deep dive into web3.py internals: JSON-RPC round trips

• Echidna v2.0.1: adds Foundry support, bug fixes

• OpenZeppelin Contracts for Cairo v0.1.0: account abstraction, ERC20 & ERC721 implementations, Ownable, Pausable, SafeMath and Proxy

• GitPOAP: POAPs for contributing to open source

Security

• Inverse Finance $15.6 million exploit, price oracle manipulation due to TWAP with short window

• Starstream exploit on Metis Andromeda Layer 2, public execution function allowed Stars tokens to be drained from the treasury

• Convex Finance vulnerability disclosed, multi-sig owners could potentially gain control of staked LP tokens, $15 billion was at risk, patched

Ecosystem

• Tim Beiko’s roadmap FAQ covering the merge, withdrawals & sharding

• Fake revoke approvals site used to get holders to approve NFTs

• VaynerSports: $8 million in NFT sales but $26 million spent on gas, record 106 ETH burnt in one block by EIP1559

• EF’s client incentive program updated with technical details 

Enterprise

• Proof of concept usage of Baseline pattern at European Investment Fund

Application layer

• Umbra (stealth address payments) live on Arbitrum & Optimism

• Index Coop icETH: leverage liquid staking using Set Protocol & Aave

• Gem (NFT marketplace aggregator): adds listing analytics, filter by traits/price/rarity

• Pando applies to onboard solar loans with Maker

• Curve wars: Luna and FRAX propose 4pool (UST, FRAX, USDC & USDT) in attempt to undercut DAI’s spot in 3pool (USDT, USDC & DAI)

• Gradual Dutch Auctions: sell tokens without liquid markets, discrete GDA for selling NFTs & continuous GDA for selling fungible tokens

• veDAO announces plans to bring Solidly v2 to Optimism

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Job Listings

• EF ecosystem support hiring for Communications, Analyst & Admin Assistant

• Hifi is hiring a Senior Solidity Engineer & Community/Social Media Manager

• EF’s Privacy & Scaling Explorations team: Technical Project Coordinator, ZKP Security Engineer, L2 Security Engineer & Marketing Ops Manager

• EF hiring Test Engineer to improve testing infrastructure & coverage

• Devcon needs a front-end web developer

• SideShift.ai is hiring a Solidity Engineer. Good job!

Reach developers experienced with Ethereum.  $600 for four issues (~75 character limit), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to abcoathup.eth on mainnet, Arbitrum or Optimism.  Questions? abcoathup at-gmail

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Regulation/business/tokens

• UK government plans: regulate stablecoins for payment use, legislate financial market infrastructure sandbox & explore tax treatment of DeFi loans and make UK a global crypto hub

• US SEC Chair: potential areas for regulation, protect retail traders, work with CFTC, separate exchange & custody and separate market making 

• Worldpay to allow merchants to receive settlement in USDC

• Wyre acquired by Bolt for $1.5 billion

• Christine Kim (Galaxy Digital Research): what to expect from the merge

General

• Contribute to Semaphore’s trusted setup ceremony

• Trezor users targeted in phishing attacks after MailChimp compromised

• Jameson Lopp: how to backup a seed phrase

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Follow @WeekinEthNews to find out what the most clicked links are. Follow @evan_van_ness and @abcoathup to get most of the week’s news in real time.

Permalink for this week’s issue: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-april-9-2022

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Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

• Apr 18-25 – Devconnect (Amsterdam)

• Apr 22 – deadline for EF academic grants round

• Apr 22-24 – ETHAmsterdam

• May 3-5 – Spaghett ETH (Milan)

• May 6-27 – ETH Global Hack Money

• May 17-20 – EY Global blockchain summit

• May 20 – US Fed CBDC discussion paper feedback deadline

• Jun 10-12 – ETHPrague

• Jun 20-23 – NFT.NYC

• Jun 24-26 – ETH NYC

• Jul 8 – ETH Seattle summit

• Jul 19-21 – EthCC 5 (Paris)

• Aug 19-21 – ETHMexicoCity

• Aug 27-28 – DeFi Security Summit (Stanford)

• Aug 29-31 – Science of Blockchain Conference (Stanford)

• Sep 1-4 – ETHWarsaw (hackathon & conference)

• Sep 6-9 – MCON 2 (Denver)

• Sep 12-14 – DappCon (Berlin)

• Oct 11-14 – Devcon 6 (Bogotá)

• Nov 4-6 – ETHSanFrancisco

• Dec 1-4 – ETHDownUnder (Sydney)

• Dec 2-4 – ETHTaipei

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OhNoEthereum via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @Andrew B Coathup, @Khareem Sudlow